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Help! I deleted and shouldn't have..

Hi all,

Actually my friend deleted. She "thought" she had made a nice CD with every picture ever taken of her children and it was safe to delete every .jpg saved on her computer (it's a PC) so she deleted them and then emptied the recycle bin to free up space on her hard drive before making sure her CD actually worked.

As nightmares go she put her CD in only to find out it was blank and she hadn't copied over any of the .jps.

Try http://www.restorer2000.com/
I've used it recently to recover some logs that got removed when upgrading an application. Worked like a charm. Downside, you will need to spend $50 to buy it, but I assume the pictures are worth at least that.

NOTE: If you do buy this or use something like it, do NOT install it on the same drive you are trying to recover files from, load it to a CD or somerthing. Secondly, do as little changes until the recovery to the drive you want to recover files from, if they get written over, they are pretty much history.

Last edited by Opus00; December 18th, 2006 at 11:13 PM.

There are two rules for success in life:
Rule 1: Don't tell people everything you know.

Please do not consider this to be a foolish comment, it is based on experience; believe me.

Please have a look at the CD on at least one other computer, and with at least one other operating system.

Media is pretty fickle stuff and it could be that the CD/DVD drive is not too happy with it, even though it burnt it.

I am assuming that the CD burn ran for what would have seemed to be a reasonable time, and that it did not just spit the CD out without telling her that it had completed? That is a sure indication that the burn failed

Question: when she inserts the CD does her operating system "see" that there is a CD in the drive and want to format it or whatever, or does it give some message along the lines of "insert media into drive D:\ (or similar)"

If it is the first, then it sounds as if she burnt a coaster, if it is the second then it might be that it worked, and can be recovered using a different machine.

For future reference, the "rules" are very simple:

1. Always use good quality media (cheap = coasters) that you have tested with that particular burner.

2. If it is important, burn at half speed or so, have the software test the burn, make a second copy, then check that you can read them.

Otherwise, you need recovery software, as suggested, and might also look at what can be recovered from the camera as well?

I've certainly had problems with cheap CDs and by paying a little more, I have the peace of mind that they're reliable and last longer. I've also been frustrated by seeing an apparantly empty CD to have the contents show up quite happily on a different PC.

I know that CD and DVD writing has been around for a while for the home user (as I am). I just hope that all interested parties (i.e. CD/DVD writer and media manufacturers, as well as the software producers) would get together and agree on a "formula" that is common so we (as end users) could be sure that everything is fully compatible.